Here is a snippet of a speech I found this morning by accident. I wish there was a full video. RFK was speaking in Ft. Wayne, Indiana on April 10, 1968 about gun control in the aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. What is extraordinary about the snippet, though, is that, here RFK was in the heart of a hotly contested primary campaign, and he is telling an audience of very comfortable white people that he is about to talk about something they may not have wanted to hear. And his message in the beginning was that we are all in this together. But he also saying that something can be done when people pull together. It is extraordinary to hear and see him, speaking in his often halting, deeply honest manner, because so much of what Trump, for example, says is not that style of rhetoric. It is a language of divisiveness and hopelessness about doing anything other than tearing down any sense that we should support the government in our nation. Trump, though, is hardly unique in this regard, however. For many other politicians who have run for political office, since at least Reagan's time, including Reagan himself, talk in that way of making an important institution in our lives, i.e. government, an enemy when it is to be used in a way to promote the general welfare. Instead, they promote fear and dividing people to promote that aspect of government which involves the police and the military. Those are fine sub-institutions, but when there is severe inequality, when people are suffering and frustrated, those sub-institutions may be used by elites in ways that are truly oppressive and destructive.
We are approaching, next June, the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of RFK. The hope I have is that enough of our children's generation may have found RFK's spirit, and may not have the same aversion against that spirit that propagandized our generation. The key is to not get tied down in ideologies, but to see those ideologies more as an aesthetic* than narrow blueprints. We must remember our greatest leaders were those who understood nation building and nation sustaining. It is what Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, TR, FDR and even, to some extent, LBJ understood, which is to use government as a tool to develop infrastructure, jump start new industries and do the things that develop and then maintain a nation of people. Unfortunately, the wreckage of Baby Boomers and our parents continues apace, and I continue to fear a generational backlash is coming.
There are four legs which support the chair that is society: government, business, labor, and religion. These four institutions have natural overlapping interests, natural antagonisms, and sometimes form natural alliances against the other. It is a series of balancings and negotiations. Right now, however, we live in a society where we have nearly destroyed the leg that is labor. We live in a society where we have crippled the ability of government to function as anything other than an instrument of physical oppression in the form of the military and police. And we live in a society where too many religious institutions are factories of hatred and clannishness, and add the insult of promoting dogmas that promote ignorance and cripple critical thinking. We are seriously out of balance, and...
Oh well. What might have been...what might have been. However, as the light of future loving, healthy and helpful alternatives grows dim, there does, again, remain a hope on my part in the youth of our nation.
* What I mean by this term aesthetic is more of what Oscar Wilde meant, but not quite. I mean we should, for example, see democratic socialism/New Deal liberalism as something like Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. It is something to aspire to, and speak of to children. It is not something that has to be legislated at every level, not something that itself takes on the rigidity of dogma, and not something that substitutes for critical thinking. Policy-making is about drawing lines, experimenting, and contouring over time. It is about what Daniel Bell was trying to get at in his last essay in his book, "The End of Ideology" (1960). He was trying to say that we should speak about more about public policy and less about ideology. Bell also saw what Lenny Bruce once remarked, which is his frustration with people who suffer from too much organized religion because they get hung up on "good" and "evil" instead of "right" and "wrong." The latter two are about rules of law. The other two are about apocalyptic visions that descend into hatred and violence. And what that means too is that, within these institutions, there are extremists and, more particulaly, those who do not see how each institution needs to protect against supremacy over the other institutions. Again, "balancing" is a key word here. Oh, and here is a snippet from Walter Cronkite's nightly news in 1968 with RFK confronting white protestors in Oregon who hated RFK for even daring to say that we should stop criminals and mentally ill people from having guns.
